1. There are no secrets to admissions though each university does have priorities which shape admissions. Beyond looking at the information colleges provide about how they evaluate applications, spending time trying to figure out if there is a “secret handshake” which will give you admittance is a waste of time.

This doesn’t mean that all things are equal and no strategy is necessary. I strongly recommend that you carefully research universities and craft your application to match the schools which you want to attend–more about this below. But those who spend hour after hour on the chat threads on College Confidential, hoping to find something guaranteeing them an acceptance letter from their favorite school, should instead spend the time working on their essays.

Maybe you know a guy who knows a guy who knows that U.C. Berkeley is looking for engineering students who are the first in their families to go to college, but . . . so what? Even if this is true (and it was recently) this kind of “fact” changes each year. Every university has dozens of priorities for admissions, priorities which are revised both before and during the admissions process each year; as students are admitted and categories fill, numbers like the SAT average and ethnicity for applications and admits also change. Early on, the college may be looking for students who fit a particular profile, but once that fills or starts to fill, they can shift the priority to a different category .

Why? The universities have one eye on you and another eye on things like their ranking in the U.S. News and World Report. The take away is that you can’t spend time worrying about things which will change even as apps arrive at the college.

As an example of an admissions priority which is changing, San Jose State is currently embroiled in a controversy over giving preference to students coming from Santa Clara County, where the university is located. For this year, they have backed off from eliminating this preference, but facing 60 million dollars in budget cuts right now, they are likely, within another year or so, to eliminate it. Why? You could say that, to be fair to all applicants in a statewide university system, they can’t act like a local school, but more realistically this move seems designed to allow more space for students who will pay more–foreign and out-of-state students, for example. This will also increase their selectivity and so tend to improve their national ranking.

And this is only one of many preferences facing evaluation and possible revision this year for San Jose State alone, which like the rest of the Cal State schools uses the supposedly simple objective admissions process; add to this the priorities assigned to various schools and majors within the university, and you have some idea of how complex the calculus is for every school. Do the same for a holistic admissions university and it’s even more complex.

See my last post for more information on how universities assess applications and what a holistic versus objective evaluation entails, and look below for my link to the U.C. Santa Cruz evaluation to see a detailed list of factors considered–keep in mind that these vary to some degree from school to school, even within the U.C. system.

2. Grades and test scores are the most important factors in evaluations of college applicants.

You can count on grades and scores to be the first but not only consideration as your application is evaluated. If you are a top student in a good school, if you have excellent SAT/ACT scores, a broad set of activities and a clear area of specific excellence and passion, you will be admitted to most schools you apply to. If you do not fit this description, you may have fewer options, but fear not: there is a college with a spot for every student in the country with decent grades and test scores. You may have to go further afield, of course, but you are not forever doomed by a few C’s and B’s. As for GPA, it’s your unweighted average that is directly compared and which is used in the averages the universities publish with their profiles of admitted students; your weighted average does matter as it establishes your class rank, and can be used as an additional factor in direct comparisons, but the unweighted GPA is the first thing assessed, along with SAT/ACT test scores.

3. Some things do trump grades and test scores, but these tend to be very specific and very obvious exceptions.

Your favorite university is, in fact, looking for you if you show a clear ability or potential to excel at something of value to the institution– if you are a recognized musical talent with decent grades or a mathematical prodigy or a 6’4″ All-CIF high school linebacker running a 4.5 second 40 yard dash and bench pressing 350 lbs, for example. But even with exceptional skills in some area, such as tackling other large, fast people, you must still show that you have the academic chops to survive as a student at the specific school, though some entities, like athletic departments, may supply assistance in the form of tutoring.

If you want this quantified further, a 2008 study showed that players on top 25 football and basketball teams had SAT scores 220 points below the average for the rest of the student body at these schools. Obviously elite athletic programs get priority at many schools.

Unfair, you say? Not from the institution’s point of view. It has its own priorities, with money and reputation near or at the top of the list, and sports are important both to boosters and to most students. So are many other talents. If you doubt my claims, see my entry about admissions stats for early 2012and scroll down to my discussion of Stanford for further details on the importance of athletics. It seems that the football team is important even at an intellectual paragon like Stanford.

The next rule is for the vast majority who do not fit the exceptional niches that most universities set aside and who do not have a perfect academic record.

4. It’s okay to be human. A few B’s and a C will not kill your chances of admission to any but the most competitive universities, especially if you show a desire to push your limits by taking challenging classes in which you are not always perfect. As you create your application portfolio, your essays and extracurriculars can reveal important and valuable aspects of you that can offset relative weaknesses in your grades or test scores. Good recommendations are also important. For an example of a the kinds of additional factors, see the U.C. Santa Cruz website, where they list fourteen factors used in making evaluations–they are, for example, giving California residents preference (at least as of this year’s applicants), something that other U.C.’s are moving away from (as I pointed out above, they get more money from a nonresident. . . )

My advice: Try to keep things in perspective as you prepare for college. I have known a few Valedictorians who were really living miserable lives in order to “win” academic honors. I think it’s better to be less than perfect and to enjoy your life rather than to live in torment over every grade point. There are many schools you have not heard of where you could be perfectly happy and be well educated. If you are a resident of a western state, see my post here for more information on finding a good university in the West and potentially saving a lot of money as an extra boon.

5. The college application process starts early. In fact, it should begin no later than the Sophomore year in high school. Even the Freshman year in high school is increasingly important, if not as part of your GPA, then as part of your overall academic trajectory (they want to see increasing difficulty and challenge in your class selection from year to year). I think this is unfair and unwise–many people struggle to adjust in the first year or two of high school, and there are myriad examples of successful people who did not excel early–but this is the way things are going as competition for admission to selective universities increases.

On the other hand . . . a student who stumbled early should not give up. The holistic schools will look at other aspects of your application that may explain or offset some academic shortcomings.

You should make a serious effort to establish relationships with counselors and cultivate relationships with teachers, for you will need recommendations. Try to develop these relationships early and in a sincere way, which requires something from you as well as from them. When dealing with teachers, show interest and be helpful when possible–and show an interest in the academic subject of the teacher, not just in yourself and your opinions.

By your Junior year, you want your counselor to know your face, your name and your important interests. If you are a Junior and haven’t talked to your counselor, there is no time like the present.

Be straightforward about your desire to work with your counselor as part of your application process. Ask them for their advice–they are usually knowledgeable if not expert, and people like to share what they know, so let your counselor talk. If your counselor seems less than eager, on the other hand, it might have to do with budget cuts that have loaded them with 500–or more–students. Be polite and persistent.

6. Essays are Important and can separate you from your competitors. And in the essays, as in your activities, authenticity matters. Your application self and your real self need to have a clear relationship. If your verbal score on the SAT was 550 but your essays read like Zadie Smith wrote them, your app will not do well, even if your SAT math score was perfect. Most experienced admissions readers can predict your SAT verbal from reading your essays, and if you farmed your essays out to one of the ghost writers offering their services on the internet, you are most likely doomed, not just for a lack of academic skill, but more importantly because you lack integrity. Getting editing help and reader input on your essay is fine; faking it is not.

This can be a gray area when you seek editing–as an example, I do detailed, line-by-line editing and suggest better phrasing as well as offering more holistic evaluations of essays, but ultimately my client’s essays are theirs. My job as an editor is to give them ways to reshape the clay that they provide, but the essays are and must be student material. Any editing help provided must be both sensible and sensitive as well as honest.

For a holistic school, like all of the Common Application schools, authenticity means more than your test scores and class rank. In general, the admissions readers genuinely try to construct a full picture of you from your materials, from grades through essays. Many students try to create a false self in their essays, just as these same students may be dabbling in many activities just to get them on the “resume.” Find a way to say something authentic in your essays–this can take time and will involve reading for some of the recent prompts for supplemental essays.

7. Activities are important, especially those that show a long-term interest and commitment, but for authentic intellectual development, reading widely is the best approach. Reading is one of the best ways to add authentically to your general knowledge and to deepen your understanding of the world, and many college applications recognize this in their essay prompts, which either ask for or allow books as topics. This does not mean that you should start reading the most serious possible literature immediately. In fact, I link you here to an excellent essay by Michael Chabon, one of our best contemporary writers, on his love for comic books, with a vigorous defense of their value. Yes, reading comic books is –oh, excuse me, I mean reading graphic novels– is intellectually respectable, or at least it can be. So go ahead and start with the supposedly lightweight, but be sure to move onward and outward from there. You might try going from comics to Chabon’s The Adventures of Cavalier and Clay,for example, or from Neil Gaiman’s graphic novels to his, well, novels, likeAmerican Gods.

In addition to being generally useful, a good reading program will pay off in the application essays. Your life will most likely have a few important episodes that might work in an autobiographical essay, but the number of experiences available to you through books is relatively limitless. With the Common App and most holistic universities using essay prompts which directly address books or for which books are a good topic, reading is a good place to put in some time.

I have previously discussed writing about books, and will be addressing this again in future posts, but you can’t do a good job writing about books if you do not start reading early.

If you are already a Junior, and don’t read beyond what is assigned in school, it’s a bit late but not too late. I will have some suggestions for reading programs over the summer for all types of students in a later post.

Those are my rules, or guidelines, if you will. Look for more posts in the near future on writing about books and other application matters.

In addition to working as an editor and college advisor, I have taught at the high school and college levels, including twenty years of experience in Advanced Placement English Literature, which was where I first began helping students with admissions to elite universities. After working with applications officials at multiple universities, ... Continue reading →